Aurélien Robert

Selon les histoires classiques de la philosophie, il aurait fallu attendre le XVe siècle pour voir le retour de Platon et de Pythagore sur la scène de la pensée. Pourtant, au XIVe siècle, bien avant la Renaissance, un noble vénitien, Marco Trevisano, écrit pour son fils un livre intitulé Du macrocosme. Il s'y définit lui-même comme un disciple des deux géants antiques et décrit l'origine du monde et sa constitution en termes mathématiques. Ce texte, encore inédit à ce jour, n'a jamais été étudié pour lui-même et dans son contexte. Aurélien Robert fait revivre la pensée de ce lettré et savant laïc, qui ne fréquentait ni université, ni couvent. Le cas de Marco Trevisano montre à quel point la philosophie du Moyen Âge ne peut être résumée aux grands noms des manuels scolaires. Et surtout, il interroge les frontières entre ce que nous appelons d'ordinaire la scolastique médiévale et l'humanisme de la Renaissance. Une étude remarquable d'une figure méconnue mais capitale."--Page 4 of cover.

Dans les grandes histoires de l’épicurisme, seul Nicolas d’Autrécourt est parfois mentionné pour le Moyen Âge en raison de son atomisme. Bien qu’il ne se dise jamais épicurien et qu’il refuserait probablement cette étiquette, il défend une thèse longtemps associée à Épicure : tout ce qui apparaît est vrai. Bien qu’il ait pu savoir qu’il s’agissait d’une thèse épicurienne, nous faisons l’hypothèse qu’il arrive à ce résultat parce que leur ambition était la même : sauver Démocrite sans tomber dans le scepticisme qui lui est attribué par Aristote. Cet article compare de manière systématique Épicure et Nicolas d’Autrécourt dans le but d’éclairer leurs théories de la connaissance.

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, Nicole Oresme raises a question that he is apparently the first to ask in these terms, in such a context: do all beings have the desire to persevere into being? Before him, this question is not found in any of the medieval commentaries on Aristotle’s Physics. But after him it became canonical until at least the 16th century, since it can be found in Pietro Pomponazzi’s works for example. The novelty here consists in questioning the validity of Averroes’ thesis, in his own commentary on the Physics, according to which all beings have the desire to persist into being, using the Augustinian analysis of voluntary death and suicide. How can we explain that one can freely put an end to his days if he is naturally inclined by a desire for life and even for eternity? Oresme’s solution consists in justifying not only the possibility, but also the moral obligation to accept death under certain conditions. In most cases, we do not really want to die. The desperate man wishes to cancel his misfortune and the heroic man who sacrifices himself for his country wishes to immortalize himself in the memory of other men. From a moral point of view, Nicole Oresme justifies only one case of voluntary death: that of individual sacrifice for the common good. The aim of this paper is to analyze precisely this important turning point in the long history of the notion of conatus in the West by comparing this quaestio from the commentary on the Physics with the glosses that accompany the French translation of the Nicomachean Ethics realised by Oresme at the court of Charles V.

The aim of this paper is to show that John Wyclif’s theory of space is at once an interpretation of the Platonic theory of place and a Neopythagorean conception of magnitudes and numbers. The result is an original form of mathematical atomism in which atoms are point-like entities with a particular situation in space. If the core of this view comes from Boethius’ De arithmetica, John Wyclif is also influenced by Robert Grosseteste’s metaphysics, which includes the Boethian number theory within the Christian tale of the creation of the world ex nihilo. John Wyclif, however, adds some novelty to this theory concerning the epistemological status of this hypothetical description of the creation of the world out of atoms. First, according to Wyclif, whereas geometry is concerned with sensible and imaginable beings, arithmetic, which is purely intellectual, has access to the deep mathematical structure of the universe. He then suggests a subordination of geometry under arithmetic, which he considers the most solid basis for his metaphysics. As a result, with the attribution of numbers and units to every level of reality, it becomes possible to reform our natural imagination, so that it can imagine the atomic structure of matter and space.

Comment définir l’homme d’un point de vue médical, sans tomber dans un pur matérialisme? Voilà la question que se posèrent les médecins italiens de la fin du Moyen Âge lorsqu’ils élaborèrent une théorie complète de la notion de complexion, conçue comme « qualité substantielle » propre à l’homme, mais variant dans certaines limites en fonction de l’hérédité, du régime, de l’âge ou encore des climats et des moeurs. Dès lors, certains de ces médecins pouvaient envisager d’améliorer, par leur art, non seulement la santé, mais aussi l’humanité de chaque individu.

Le lecteur francophone peut enfin apprécier ce qui subsiste de la correspondance entre Nicolas d’Autrécourt, Bernard d’Arezzo et Gilles du Foin. Malgré les quelques lettres perdues, les deux lettres envoyées à Bernard, la lettre de Gilles et la réponse de Nicolas sont autant de témoignages remarquables des discussions philosophiques du XIVe siècle. On trouvera aussi dans ce volume, en annexe, quelques textes choisis avec soin, pertinents pour une bonne compréhension de la philosophie autrécurienne dans son contexte historique. Il s’agit d’articles condamnés dont quatre confessés et trente-deux contenus dans la cédule «Malheur à moi», des extraits de l’Exigit ordo, ainsi qu’un court texte intitulé «Proclamation présomptueuse» et des articles envoyés à Paris. Ces articles sont des rétractations sur certaines de ses positions fondamentales condamnées pour la plupart en 1347.

It is well known that during the Middle Ages the Eucharist was not only a theological question but also a philosophical one. Recent studies have shown the semantical and ontological problems concerning the status of substances and accidents after the transsubstantiation. Here the paper focuses on the gnoseological problem of the Eucharist. How do we know that the substance has changed after the consecration of the host? Moreover, how do we manage to know substances in general if sometimes it changes without apparent modifications in the accidental features apprehended by our sense faculties? The aim of this paper is to show that a new dilemma appeared at the end of the 13th century between the sceptical consequences of the dogma of transsubstantiation and the necessity to abandon or at least to interpret differently the sacrament. Wyclif chose the second option while most of the theologians and philosophers tried to adapt their theory of knowledge, especially the Franciscans, to which a large part of this paper is devoted. This paper tries to assess the different solutions to this problem of the knowability of substances.

When contemporary philosophers look at the medieval debate on intentionality, they usually have in mind what we call “Brentano’s thesis”. Indeed, Brentano ascribes to some medieval philosophers the thesis according to which objects of thought have a special kind of being that explains how can our thoughts be about this or that kind of things. Here, we decided to focus on the debates among the so-called “Latin Averroists”, because they clearly show that the medieval question on intentionality cannot be reduced to the well-known theory of intentional beings. More precisely, we endeavored to understand an apparently strange question that appeared in the faculties of arts in France and in Italy in the 14th century: to which category do intentions in the mind belong to? In Aristotelian terms: are they substances or accidents? The problem is the following: if they are accidents, how can they represent something else that an accident? If they are substances, what does it mean to affirm that we have substances in the mind, even intentional substances? After a detailed analysis of the responses one can find in Siger of Brabant, Angelo of Arezzo, Matthew of Gubbio, John of Göttingen, Anthony of Parma, Bartholomew of Bruges and John of Jandun, we try to show that only a very few philosophers adopted the formal identity thesis , according to which the object in the mind is formally identical with the object known outside the mind. This shows that a lot of medieval philosophers didn’t limit intentionality to intentional being or formal identity, but also considered other explanations of how the human mind can think about objects for which no representation can be found in the mind.

Contrary to what is generally said about the reception of Epicurus in the Middle Ages, many medieval authors agreed on his great wisdom, even if he made some philosophical and theological errors. From the 12th century to the 14th century on can find several "Lives of Epicurus" in which the best sayings of Epicurus are gathered from ancient sources (Seneca, Cicero, Lactantius, etc.). In this paper, we follow these quite unknown sources about Epicureanism in the Middle Ages. We try to show that if Epicurus was considered as a wise man in the MIddle Ages, Epicureans are condemned because after the Revelation of God's word, Christians can only accept Epicurus's ascetic ethics, not his errors about the eternity of the world, the mortality of the soul et the subordination of happiness to pleasure.